In At the Mercy of Their Clothes, Celia Marshik deftly weaves together high, low, and middlebrow culture, archival and literary sources, fashion studies, social history, and philosophy. The result is a volume that illuminates the overwhelming, charged power of clothes in the modernist era. Marshik tackles the biggest issues: how fashion conveys meaning; how clothes create or dismantle social identity; ... Read morethe role of material culture in art, literature, and history; and finally, how we live both with and through objects. A work of superb, wide-ranging research offering an intriguing new perspective.
Rhonda Garelick, Author of Mademoiselle: Coco Chanel and the Pulse of History This is a marvelous book. At The Mercy of Their Clothes is timely, original, and ranges widely. Marshik dexterously puts current conversations in fashion studies into serious dialogue with the literary-alongside the archival, the visual, the journalistic and the psychological. Moreover, in sewing together under-read middlebrow and popular writers with what we thought we knew about modernism, Marshik lets us hear these garment-things speak.
Jessica Burstein, author of Cold Modernism: Literature, Fashion, Art Marshik convincingly demonstrates that few things are more worrisomely lively than the clothes we wear. More than simply magical talismans or fetish objects, they are potentially hazardous wights that can leech away human subjectivity. The inward turn of modernism, when seen this way, becomes less about a Freudian discovery of inner riches than about an ongoing retrenchment in which the self becomes ever more subject to things-and particularly to those things we wear every day. This book is far more than just a study of clothing... it is a significant rethinking of modernism, combining cultural history and theoretical innovation on almost every page.
Sean Latham, University of Tulsa Clothes are dangerous. Instead of presenting dress as a form of self-expression, Marshik reveals its power to diminish, imperil and undo the modern self. In this highly original and exciting book, she ranges from Ulysses to the Sunday Pictorial, from Mrs. Dalloway to The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher, demonstrating the potentiality of garments across modernist, middlebrow and popular cultures in Britain. A superb achievement.
Faye Hammill, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow Show Less